A lot of the hysteria around getting into prestigious colleges comes from the belief that if you can just get into one, the advantage of attaching that name to yourself will leave you set for the rest of your life, assured that success and everything else will work out how you (or your parents) want it to.
But life doesn’t work that way.
People who get into Harvard aren’t set for the rest of their lives. They’ll still stumble. They’ll have disappointments. They may even have their hearts broken a time or two. These things don’t happen because Harvard failed them. They happen because that’s life, no matter where you went to college. Show me a happy and successful adult, and I guarantee you they’ve experienced their share of disappointments, too. You can’t insulate yourself from that.
But here’s the good news.
Wherever you go to college, you can learn as much as you can about a subject that fascinates you. You can discover your talents. You can try just about anything you’ve ever wanted to try, often with very few repercussions if things don’t go well.
And more importantly, you can prepare for what life will give you. You can try things that intimidate you. You can learn from your failures and come back stronger next time. You can find ways to make the best of situations that didn’t pan out like you’d hoped.
This is not my way of telling teenagers they should prepare for a life filled with nothing but recurring disappointment. There are a lot of wonderful things out there in the world for you during and after college. But a prestigious college doesn’t present an unobstructed path for you to access them.
If you’ve been working like crazy in high school to get into your dream school, you’re off to a great start. You know how to set goals and how to work for them. You’re invested in creating the future that you want. And you’re starting to prepare yourself for what it will take to get it.
But remember that no matter what your first choice college says, it won’t give you—or rob you of—those dreams. Pursue them wherever you go to college. And use your four years to learn how to manage the occasional downs so you can maximize the hopefully far more frequent ups.